Who is involved in CrossCheck?

CrossCheck was devised and developed by First Draft and Google News Lab in consultation with newsroom partners across France. The project is a collaboration of news, education and technology partners. You will find a full list of local, national and international partners on this page

How is CrossCheck funded?

As a founding partner of First Draft, Google News Lab has provided financial support for CrossCheck to help us build the website, train the partners and employ administrative and editorial support for the duration of the project. This support also enables us to place 12 journalism students in the newsrooms of participating partners for 8 weeks to gain verification and reporting experience.

How does CrossCheck select what to investigate?

We are inviting the public to submit questions about stories and claims they are seeing and hearing via our CrossCheck form. This is available here on our site and will also be embedded by partners on their own sites and across social media pages. We will be using Google Trends to monitor public searches across the country to inform us of the kinds of information and answers that the public is seeking. We are using CrowdTangle and NewsWhip to flag pages and posts that are gaining prominence across the web and we will be conducting our own manual monitoring of sites and social media pages using keywords relating to each of the candidates and each political party. CrossCheck is an independent project free from bias. We will be actively seeking to investigate and report stories and claims from all sources.

Who decides which organisations are involved?

Members of the First Draft partner network first discussed the idea for this project at a partner meeting at the end of 2016. We then tentatively approached additional newsrooms to see if there was interest in working collaboratively. Our focus has always been to gain representation from local and national organisations, regardless of affiliation. After a number of meetings with early partners, we publicly announced the project and offered an open invitation for others to be involved. Since then we have grown our CrossCheck France network from 17 to 34 partners.

How will CrossCheck work?

The CrossCheck name refers to the verification discipline adopted by all journalists within this network. Each journalist shares notes and evidence with journalists from other partner organisations, detailing the steps taken to inform their decision about a piece of content. Sometimes they will have drawn a conclusion about whether something is true or false, but sometimes it will be harder to make that distinction. Sometimes the conclusion will be that it’s impossible to draw a final conclusion, or other times it might be that the content is true but the context is misleading etc. The conclusion will only be published when at least one other participating news partner has reviewed and agreed the checks that have been made. This is called a CrossCheck.

How are we sure that something is true or false?

We can not always be certain that something is true or false, but there are a number of checks that we can make to draw a conclusion or at least collect evidence to help the public decide. We will always explain how we reached a decision in our own reports and will link to as many sources as necessary.

How can we contact you?

For all enquiries, please email crosscheck@firstdraftnews.com and we will reply to you as soon as we can.